I am sandwiched in the middle of a basketball team sized family of brilliant siblings so I am, generally speaking, pro-sibling, and perhaps for that reason I love finding portrayals of this unique relationship in SFF. But while it’s common to find children’s books with siblings as joint protagonists, working together, this natural grouping seems to die out abruptly in YA and adult novels. Our protagonists fight and magic and politick their way through realms of fantastic worlds and alternative futures but more commonly they do so as loners, or with friends or romantic partners, rather than with family. Amidst all the orphans and only children and protagonists whose families have been killed off off-screen, where do all our siblings go when we grow up?
Obviously having your protagonist out on their own can be convenient from a narrative point of view, but leaving siblings in to support, antagonise, frustrate and really know our protagonist opens up all kinds of excellent potential for fascinating, nuanced relationships that add to the story even as they complicate it. Here are five SFF books that take on this challenge and run with it.
Court of Fives series by Kate Elliot
In this series, billed as “Little Women meets American Ninja Warrior in Greco-Roman Egypt,” the main character, Jes, is an athlete with a Commoner mother and an upper class Patron father. Her dream is to compete for the Fives, an athletic competition that offers a chance for glory, but due to the society’s strict rules and her father’s delicate position, the only way she can compete is in secret. When disaster strikes and a ruthless Lord tears Jes’s family apart, she is forced into a much more deadly game of politics and loyalty, and a desperate plan to save her mother and sisters. This story has so much going for it that I love (competitive girls in sports! Intricate political scheming and cultural clashes! Slow burn background magic!) but easily my favourite element was the portrayal of Jes’s family over the course of the trilogy, and particularly her complex, well-realised relationships between her sisters. Elliott really nails the layers of family dynamic, crafting four very distinct sisters with their own character arcs and motivations, and the complex mix of love, combativeness, defensiveness and trust that binds them together.
The Bone Doll’s Twin by Lynn Flewelling
Lynn Flewelling’s Tamir Triad is set in a world where a divine prophecy and a line of warrior queens protected the country until a usurper king claimed his sister’s throne. Determined to ensure his own son’s succession, the mad king kills all of his female relatives to avoid the return of a queen. At the time of Tobin’s birth, a witch casts a dark spell to sacrifice Tobin’s twin brother and give his appearance to his sister to protect her from her murderous uncle, the king. But they are interrupted during the ritual and the baby boy takes a breath before he can be sacrificed, so his spirit is tied to the land. “Brother” spends his days haunting his family, determined to seek revenge for his murder.
Brother is an intrinsic feature of the story, a reminder of the evil act that was done by otherwise “good” characters to protect Tobin and bring about his/her eventual return as Queen Tamir. Brother’s disruptive, sometimes malevolent force acts against the characters throughout, and Tobin’s developing relationship with the ghost is the aspect of this story I loved the best. At times frightening, always creepy, sometimes pitiful or even touching, this shadow brotherhood, underpinned by recognisable jealousies and tensions (after all, what happened to Brother was in a way the ultimate “favouritism” by parents), makes these books stand out among their peers.
False Hearts by Laura Lam
Conjoint twins Taema and Tila are the protagonists of Laura Lam’s near future thriller, False Hearts. The twins were physically separated at age sixteen, when they fled a cult that banned modern medicine in order to get medical assistance for their failing (single) heart. Now living apart from her sister and in very different worlds, Taema is suddenly thrust into a world of danger when Tila shows up on her doorstep, covered in blood and accused of murder.
The narrative is told in alternating perspectives each chapter from the twins, and their differences in nature are explored both in flashbacks to their youth, when secrets were impossible, and the modern day, where Tila has become involved in a very deadly underground world, and Taema must impersonate her sister to save her life. Their closeness and distance is a crucial part of the narrative as Taema yearns to understand who her sister has become, but also fears what she finds.
Wars of Light and Shadow series by Janny Wurts
And now for a bit of antagonism—while I’m always up for a siblings-who-care-about-each-other stories, there’s the other kind, too. One of my favourite brothers-as-antagonists exploration is in the Wars of Light and Shadow, by Janny Wurts, where an ancient curse has pushed half-brothers Lysaer and Arithon into deadly foes. This is a vast, vast, did I say vast?, fantasy, intricate and layered, epic in scale and time and scope and challenging in its use of language and intersecting narratives, so it’s not for a light or casual read. In an enjoyable twist of the usual stereotypes about personalities and talents that are coded as “good,” it is not Lysaer, the charming, warm, inspiring Prince of Light, charismatic leader committed to justice and blessed with magical powers relating to heat and light, who is the main protagonist but rather Arithon, Master of Shadows, the reclusive and solitary mage whose talents allow him to create darkness, extreme cold and shaped illusion.
Although the hatred between the brothers is, in this story, a literal magic curse, I love that fundamentally it plays with a family dynamic, where real and perceived wounds and slights can fester into unrelenting, life-altering enmity. Empathetic Arithon is able to see through and break the curse, but Lysaer, faced with the same choices about self-reflection and responsibility for mistakes, chooses not to accept his culpability and to embrace Arithon’s supposed role as the villain in his life. World-wrecking, grand scale projection of real life family dramas. Love it!
A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin
And finally, no discussion of siblings would be complete without an honourable mention to ASoIaF and its vast cast of bonkers siblings, probably incomparable in terms of the sheer quantity of interesting and complicated bonds and tangles that it explores. Barely a string-free child to be found in Westeros; family dynamics is the name of the game (of thrones).
We have everyone’s favourite incestuous twins, Cersei and Jamie, whose close relationship (in every gross sense) has started to bend and fracture; the range of intra-Stark dynamics (the loving Jon and Arya, fractious, childish squabbles between Arya and Sansa, the shifting loyalties inherent in the fraught foster-brother relationship between Robb and Theon, and let’s not forget the jealousies that drove Catelyn and Lysa apart); the abusive Viserys’ use of his sister Daenerys; the sad pressures of Tyrion and Jamie and the murderous enmity of Tyrion and Cersei; Asha and Theon and the bond and rivalries between them, and SO MANY MORE. I mean, I could go on—the Baratheons, the Sand Snakes… these books are jam packed full of family loyalties and loves and fights that are often the cause of world-altering events, and it’s awesome.
A black belt in jujitsu, Sam Hawke lives with her husband and children in Australia. City of Lies is her first novel.
Interesting list.
I’d definitely have put _Brothers in Arms_ and/or _Mirror Dance_ by Bujold in that list, even though Miles and Mark aren’t exactly typical siblings.
F’Lar and F’Nor, from Pern, comes to mind.
And, of course, Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber series, that huge family drama with tribes of full and half and lost and reappearing siblings. King Oberon really slept around.
Mike, you forgot the Koudelka sisters – Delia, Olivia, Martya, and Kareen – in Mirror Dance, Memory, and A Civil Campaign.
Kate Elliot’s Jaran books have several excellent and central brother-sister relationships: Tess and Charles Soerensen: Tess’s adopted brother and sister, Yuri and Sonia – and her other adopted brother, in a later novel, Alexei.
While in effect one twin is offstage for most of the novel. Robert Heinlein’s Time for the Stars has Tom and Pat Bartlett as a central pair of characters in the narrative – even when Tom is separated from Pat by extraordinary distances, Pat is still on his mind.
And there are the bloodily devoted/utterly-screwed-up brothers of K. J. Parker’s Fencer trilogy, Bardas and Gorgas Loredan. (They have other brothers and one sister too, but the central relationship that runs through the whole trilogy is that of those two brothers.)
Interesting post! I have no siblings, and have seen in my extended fam and heard from friends how sibs can be, so I’m admittedly grateful to be an only :o. A reread of the Potter books in light of sibling/pseudo-sib relationships would be interesting.
I would add Brian Staveley’s Chronicles of Unhewn Throne trilogy.
Thanks for reading my musings.
AndrewHB
How about Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys? I’m currently reading it for the first time but it sure seems to fit the description so far!
I was glad to see ASoIaF in this list, because it really is packed full of interesting sibling relations.
From the top of my head, I was reminded of the princes Razi and Alberon from the Moorehawke trilogy, and also Wynter (half-brothers, true, and Wynter is their sister in practically anything but blood, but siblings nevertheless); and also some sets of dwarves, especially a pair of brothers who followed their uncle to a certain mountain held by a certain firedrake. Speaking of, I’m now also reminded of different siblings in “Silmarillion” … Oh, and of course Siri and Vivenna from Nalthis! And now I remembered Eragon and Murtaugh, too …
I very much liked the fraught relationship between the three brothers in Jane Fancher’s Dance of the Rings trilogy, which begins with Dance of Lightning.
Jeff VanderMeers Veniss underground comes to mind also.
As an adult woman I count two brothers among my close friends, so I also have paid attention to the depiction of adult sibling relationships in fiction. What seems to me to be missing most of all in fiction written for adults is the sister/brother relationship. It is very seldom that I read of an adult woman who is close to her brother. Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye –but (spoiler alert!) the brother tragically dies…. And in Hollywood, adult siblings come in same-sex sets. There are movies about two sisters, three sisters, two brothers, three brothers… I can name fewer than ten movies where the relationship between an adult sister & brother plays a central role (and in three of those, the sister is played by Laura Linney!). [No, I’m not counting the original Star Wars trilogy, since Luke and Leia didn’t grow up as siblings.] Is this just about lazy writing? That there are tropes and standard narratives for same-sex siblings, but not for a sister and brother? This is so mysterious to me, because it’s not all that rare a human experience to be close to a sibling of the other gender.
I will have to check out Kate Elliot’s Jaran books.
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Julian May’s ‘Intervention’ and the Galactic Milieu trilogy have multi-generational sibling rivalry between brothers.
@11/Saavik: Oh, good point! Like you, I have two brothers who I consider close friends, and it’s true, relationships like ours are rare in fiction. Some examples I can think of:
Anna Karenina starts with Anna visiting her brother and making peace between him and his wife.
In Christa Wolf’s Accident: A Day’s News the female narrator’s brother undergoes brain surgery on the day of the Chernobyl disaster. Throughout the book, the narrator thinks of him and talks to him in her mind.
Brother-sister pairs are fairly common in fairy tales: The Wild Swans, Hansel and Gretel, Brother and Sister (Brüderchen und Schwesterchen in German). Christa Wolf quotes the latter in her book. Often the brother (or the brothers) gets into trouble, and the sister rescues him.
The 1966 Esperanto film Incubus is about a brother and a sister who live together and get targeted by demons. I learned about it in a review on this site and liked it much better than the reviewer. I thought that was because of the fairytale atmosphere and the Esperanto dialogue, but now I think the brother-sister pair had something to do with it too.
John Sheridan from Babylon 5 has a sister named Elizabeth. She only appears in one episode, but they seem to be close.
In Firefly, Simon Tam gave up his life as a surgeon to rescue his sister River. Although she’s also an example of a mentally unstable sister, just like Ariana Dumbledore in Harry Potter and Eurus Holmes in the BBC Sherlock. Quite a few men with mad younger sisters in recentish genre fiction. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
Sherlock also turned Watson’s brother into Watson’s sister, with the nice side effect that Holmes makes a wrong deduction: He automatically assumes that Watson’s mobile phone used to be his brother’s. How would he know? After all, fictional male characters have brothers, not sisters.
Sheri Tepper’s Sideshow was about conjoined twins. Not her best, but still interesting.
Seconding Andrew #6. Unhewn throne trilogy isn’t just as SFF series with themes about sibling relationships – its an awesome SFF series with themes about sibling relationshipis
Narnia stories include siblings working with and against each other.
Have to recommend Sara Rees Brennan’s Demon’s Lexicon trilogy about a pair of brothers on the run from deadly magicians after their mother stole something from the magicians when they were very young. Each book is told from a different character’s POV, each featuring different sets siblings. First is two brothers, second is a brother sister pair, and third is an older sister caring for two younger siblings after the death of their mother. The series is very much about the choices people make out of love and the real and dangerous consequences of them.
What’s Left of Me and its two sequels are interesting sibling books.
If you’re s Star Wars fan, Luke and Leis’s relationship pops up throughout Legends. And Legacy of the Force has a lot of Jacen Jaina stuff.
How about twins, the warrior Caramon Majere and the mage Raistlin Majere in Margaret Weis/Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance books.
I initially quite enjoyed The Wars of Light and Shadow, but it must be said that each entry into the series after the first grew more and more difficult to read. I usually enjoy learning new words found within a given novel, but not to this extent. Add in her extensive use of her own created dialect–used not merely in quotations of the characters, but also in the describing paragraphs in abundance–and it became nigh unreadable. I remember well my high school English teachers and college professors alike and their reaction to some of the vocabulary I used. I considered–indeed, I still do consider this–it to be my particular style. They used a different word, one with negative connotations.
Pretentious.
In my opinion, Ms Wurts has gone well past style into a nightmare I’m rather surprised got past her editors. The series is nigh unreadable by Peril’s Gate book 6 of a supposed 5 book series. I consider myself fairly well read, with a vocabulary equal to or better than most, and that can be debated if one so chose, so it is beyond annoying to require a dictionary as often as I did. Most of these unfamiliar words are not ones ever used in casual conversations, and I don’t just mean anachronistic words or phrasing either. I’ve read–as a layperson with an interest, not as any type of expert–articles written by astrophysicists that were easier to comprehend. The first few novels were a fun challenge, but only a stubborn desire to see where Ms Wurts was taking the story had me bothering with the series through book 7.
Just as annoying, despite a very firm promise that the series would be done in 5 volumes, the series is well past this length now, and shows no signs of ending. The author tries to get around this by saying that several novels now represent one “volume,” but this rings as pretentious as her style.
If you enjoy such stirring reads as The Egyptian Book Of The Dead (translated by another scholar in love with his own vocabulary (my brother loaned me his copy, it was a sure cure for insomnia)) or other scholarly dissertation written for other scholars, than this series is for you. If you prefer a lighter but still challenging read, thousands of other authors/series are out there.
Max Gladstone’s The Ruin of Angels really blew me away as an exploration of what being sisters means, in blood relationships and found families alike. I highly recommend it for that aspect, and in general as a book that highlights a huge variety of relationships between women.
Ender’s Game and following titles of O. S. Card show Ender’s relationship with his sister.
Jerry and Frank (?) Cornelius.
I am surprised that no has mentioned the Ender/Andrew Wiggin quad. The relationship between Ender, Valentine, and Peter is fascinating, from the time jump as Ender travels to the piggies planet and reads 25 years of messages from Valentine as time passes for her, she has kids and they grow up, to the creation of Ender’s mind children that embody goodness as Valentine and evil as Peter.
Sorry, missed you the first read thru!
“22. Marcin
Ender’s Game and following titles of O. S. Card show Ender’s relationship with his sister”
Dune.
Moon is a harsh mistress.
Shriek:an afterword
The Alphabet Stones.
The Horus Heresy.
Sorry it’s Frank /Jerry/Catherine Cornelius.
@11/Saavik: For a long time, I was a boy among four girls, then I got a brother, and another sister.
You’re right. There aren’t a lot of stories with the brother-sister relationship at the center. I think one reason might be because people assume that particular relationship dynamic doesn’t “work” — that, eventually, a brother and sister drift apart. I can’t count the number of times people (mostly women) have asked me, “How do you get along with all those girls?”
Right now, I’m writing a speculative fiction series with an (adoptive) brother-sister duo at the center. They are very close siblings. The boy is two years older and was adopted by the parents before the girl was born, so she’s grown up with him. Unfortunately, they end up on opposite sides of a supernatural war. While the stakes make them enemies, in their own way, they each try to spare the other the worst of the fallout
What? No mention of the abusive, love/hate relationship of Caramon and Raistlin Majere in the Dragonlance Chronicles and (especially) Legends?
The latter is entirely about the sibling relationship.
Seanan McGuire includes a lot of sibling relationships. Her Incryptid series focuses on the three siblings of the Price family, and throws in other family as well. Her Newsflesh series (as Mira Grant) includes adoptive siblings George and Shaun Mason. Her Indexing series, while focused on Henry, includes her brother Gerry as well. Into the Drowning Deep includes three sisters, and the main protagonist is trying to find out what happened to her sister in Rolling in the Deep. And her October Daye series has all kinds of siblings, working both with and against one another.
One of my favorite comfort reads is Tanya Huff’s Keeper Chronicles, where the sibling rivalry between Claire and her sister Diana is a major contributor to the plot, especially in the first two books.
Luke/Leia and Jacen/Jaina (and Anakin) are definitely featured in Star Wars books.
A Series of Unfortunate Events centers around the three Baudelaires and they’ve definitely got each others’ backs :)
Summers at Castle Auburn (Sharon Shinn) is one of my favorite comfort reads and has a really lovely half-sister relationship between the main character (bastard born Coriel) and her noble half-sister Elisandre that plays out in a very non-stereotypical way (they’re not rivals in any way).
Juliet Marillier has written several retellings of fairy tales. Wildwood Dancing is derived from the Twelve Dancing Princesses and about five sisters. Daughter of the Forest is derived from the The Six Swans, although given that the brothers are swans for much of the book, it may not really explore sibling relationships – although the sequels do explore her children and their relationships.
I can certainly think of other siblings in books that I love (Faramir/Boromir, Elayne/Gawyn, etc) but the books don’t really explore those relationships.
I don’t know if this series would qualify, as it kind of um…straddles the sibling topic.
But Mira Grant’s “Newsflesh ” trilogy definitely has some siblings (adopted) who really love each other. Seriously. (I adore not only Mira Grant, but her good twin Seanan McGuire, too.) “Into the Drowning Deep” has a young woman, Tory, fighting to understand what happened to her big sister, Anne years ago. Anne, who was killed in “Rolling in the Deep” Under Seanan she writes about the Price sibs under her “InCryptid ” series. And her “Indexing” has fairy-tale twins Henrietta ( Henry) and Gerald Marchen. Anyway, I love her work, and the “Newsflesh” books are my favorite series of all time.
Sarah Monette’s series Doctrine of Labyrinths gives a fascinating description of two brothers who find each other in adulthood but form a strong bond. Hmm, that sentence works in several different directions.
Charles and Samuel (and adopted, much younger Mercy) have a strong sibling bond in Patricia Brigg’s Mercy Thompson series. But their ages are different enough that none of them were children together.
Lois McMaster Bujold does some good stuff with siblings, particularly in the Sharing Knife books. Dawn’s relationships with her older brothers seem very true to life, especially in the one where her brother ends up on the river boat with her. There we see a sibling relationship that’s a result of living together from the beginning. Another one is the team of Jelena and her brother Erick and their spaceship in the Sky Full of Stars series.
Hmm, there’s a tradition in historical romances for authors to dream up a long family and then have a series of linked books pairing off all the siblings. I guess Catherine Asaro’s Skolian Empire books almost fit that style in a space opera kind of way where the ruling family has a lot of kids and they all tend to have adventures across the galaxy. Susan Grant does it in a more romance-y way, and I bet there are other SF romance series like that.
Children of the Lens.
I’m so glad to see The Wars of Light and Shadow listed here. Janny Wurts is a long time favorite author. I love her skilled use of language and the precision with which she crafts each sentence, and chooses each point of view. I know some people have trouble grasping her style, and the depth of skill with which she writes, but for those who get what she is about, there’s no better ride to climb aboard than the one this series takes you on. It blooms and growns and surprises with every twist and turn. She has yet to disappoint me.
To the subject at hand: What I love about the brothers in this series is how complex they both are. Their strength and weakness counter balance each other, and yet their rivalry is bitter-sweet — because it stems from both long-taught behaviors arising from feuding heritage, as well as a curse that is beyond either of their control. The moist poignant moments are the ones when they recognize their own weaknesses and the pain of the journey they are on. As a reader, you will have a favorite, of course, but Janny makes it impossible to ignore the essential humanity of either of them.
Postscript: Wars of Light and Shadow was noted by someone as being a 5 book series — it isn’t. It was always planned as an 11 volume set, and the 10th released in 2017. I can’t wait for the last book! Happy reading all.
I’m surprised nobody mentioned Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys,” about the sons of the trickster Spider God and how they find each other as adults. It has really funny sibling and parent-child machinations.
I love the conflict and relationship between the two half-brothers in The Wars of Light and Shadow, they are both well-rounded characters and very difficult to predict: once I thought I had them figured out, I’m surprised yet again by some twist which, in retrospect, is fully consistent with the plot. This is one of the main asset of this great saga.
I also love the prose! Wurts’ style is usually love or hate, but as a foreign reader it was fun to focus on the wording and after some initial struggles I fell into the rhythm of the story and sailed smoothly along. The language truly enhances this tale; I’m eagerly looking forward to book #11, the last of the series.